There’s a new Jon Hamm show. I will always watch a new Jon Hamm show. I love Jon Hamm: a very handsome man who has somehow also managed to be funny and weird. Good for him.
The show, on Apple TV+, is called Your Friends and Neighbours. It’s another series about astonishingly rich people behaving badly, an absurdly popular genre which already includes The White Lotus, Succession, The Perfect Couple, Big Little Lies and Sirens, to name a few. Hamm plays Coop, a recently divorced hedge fund manager who falls on hard times and decides that the best way to re-Coop (sorry) his losses is to start stealing from his peers. Inevitably, his troubles only mount from there.
The series is fine, not wildly entertaining but good enough to occupy a slow Tuesday evening. But, as I watched it, something began to irritate me. Hamm doesn’t just play Coop, he also narrates the show as Coop. Sometimes, that voice-over is sort of useful. It is helpful for a viewer both to know that the otherwise unremarkable-looking handbag he is considering pilfering from a friend’s walk-in closet is a Birkin, and what the normal procedure is for acquiring one (spend a lot of money in Hermès and join a punishing waiting list).
The majority of the voiceover, however, is redundant. Take the following, as we watch a man vomiting into a $30,000 toilet that isn’t connected to any plumbing: “If you’re in the market for a metaphor,” says Coop the narrator, “look no further than a man vomiting into a $30,000 toilet that isn’t connected to any plumbing.”
Well, duh. Or take another scene, in which Coop is in a restaurant with his family, whom he is coming dangerously close to losing due to the burglarising he has to do to keep them afloat. In voiceover, we are told that there are “rare moments of clarity” when you can see what really matters in life and what it is “you have to save, at any cost”.
But we knew this already, from watching the scene, from watching Jon Hamm act out those emotions with his face. Television producers, it feels, are increasingly reluctant to trust viewers to pull off the process of inference; slapping a voiceover on a show makes apparent that distrust.
Television producers, it feels, are increasingly reluctant to trust viewers
Not all voiceovers are bad, of course. It works when the voiceover fits thematically with the show, as it does in something like The Handmaid’s Tale where Offred’s account of events pulses with a desperation to speak to someone, anyone, when she has nobody to confide in. It can also, if used artfully enough, become a hallmark of a show in its own right. Take You, the Penn Badgley serial killer drama whose final season aired last month. I wouldn’t call You a work of art, except insofar as deliciously bad television can be an artform in itself, but Badgley’s voiceover as the killer is so perfectly overwrought and sinister that it enhances our overall enjoyment. Or there’s Sex and the City, in which Carrie’s voiceover, ostensibly quoting from her columns in the New York Star, found a tone and rhythm all of its own that became the show’s calling card. In Arrested Development, narrator Ron Howard’s wry voice of reason underpins the wackadoo comedy on screen.
Or there are shows that use voiceover just once or twice for a particular effect. The first episode of Ozark opens with Jason Bateman’s character, Marty Byrde, delivering a voiceover monologue on how a criminal moves money as we see him lug some suspicious-looking coolers into the woods at night. Only some episodes later do we realise this monologue was actually delivered to his preteen son—a significant and sinister moment in the family’s prolonged downfall.
But all too often voiceovers simply provide lazy, even patronising exposition. The voiceover in Only Murders in the Building, Disney’s hit whodunnit, gets my goat here. A story more cleverly told wouldn’t need the characters to tell us about their interests and motivations so baldly. I’m sure that, in the case of Your Friends and Neighbours, the effect is exacerbated by the fact that Jon Hamm’s most iconic role remains Don Draper in Mad Men. Imagine if, instead of seeing that, over the course of the series, Draper is a complicated, troubled man of a breed whose era was coming to a close, we had Hamm’s voice intoning, “The thing about men like me is: we thought we could do whatever we wanted”. We know! We already know!
A decent, if clichéd, rule that might apply to voiceovers, then: the voiceover has to become a character in its own right to be worth having. And to invoke another cliché: good television should show, not tell.
